Test Results
The motherboard doesn't make a big difference to performance. We've seen this before, although overclocking on this board provides a nice 12 to 16 percent boost over its stock performance.
The differences are not significant, although overclocking moves today's board from last to first, with a 6 percent improvement.
As before, it would take a very tight scale to make the differences between boards at stock look like anything. When this board is overclocked, however, there are some substantial and unexpected changes. Although the SATA performance improves by 9 percent, which is nice, the USB3.0 performance tanks, losing a whopping 40 percent. This did not make sense, but was repeatable. On my open case, nothing should be overheating (I didn't see over 39.2 degrees Celsius -- 102.5 degrees Fahrenheit -- on the VRMs at their hottest, and the CPU OC temp, coming up soon, is not unreasonable). Oddly, the last board showed the opposite effect, but to an insignificant degree. I'd love to read some suggestions in the Comments as to why this drop-off might appear.
Today’s board is dead last at stock on both the DX9 basic and DX11 custom settings, but overclocking moves the DX9 results into first, while the DX11 still trails. The differences are still only 1 to 2 percent.
Power consumption is higher than the H81 boards tested previously, but lower than the other B85 board, until overclocking. That adds another 8W-19W, depending on the application, but does not appear inordinate, nor are the temperatures coming up next.
CPU temperature mirrors the power usage results; higher than H81 boards, and lower than another B85. I think 77 C (170.6 F) is a bit high for routine use, but a better cooler should fix that.
Once again, this test is of limited value due to my lack of control over the variables. However, there are no surprises here, which I'll take as a good thing. I ran this test repeatedly at different times and after doing different tests, and these numbers are from a typical set. There was little variance between sets.